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About Me

I am Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, where I teach in the Divinity School, American Studies, and Religious Studies. My scholarship explores the cultural politics of religious freedom, the religious histories of the American West, and the intersections of race, imperialism, and religion in U.S. history.

I’ve written two books, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). I’ve also published essays on a variety of topics including the politics of religious freedom in Native American history, the history of secularism in the United States, and the religious legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Before Yale, I taught for five years at Arizona State University and held a research fellowship at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Recent Publications

Books:

Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, October 2017.

We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Essays:

“Sovereignty,” in Religion, Law, U.S.A., edited by Joshua Dubler and Isaac Weiner. (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).

“Unitarians in an Age of Empire: Settler Colonialism, Liberal Religion, and the World’s Parliament of Religions,” Journal of Unitarian Universalist History 42 (Winter 2018).

“Freedom to Worship,” in The Four Freedoms: FDR’s Legacy of Liberty for the United States and the World, edited by Jeffrey Engel, 73-110. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

“’A New Form of Government’: Religious-Secular Distinctions in Pueblo Indian History,” in Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty, edited by Trevor Stack, Naomi Goldenberg and Timothy Fitzgerald, 68-89. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

“Religious Thought in America, 1945 to the Present,” in Cambridge History of Religions in America, vol. 3, edited by Stephen J. Stein, 674-697. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

“Indian Dances and the Politics of Religious Freedom, 1870-1930,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79:4 (December 2011): 850-878. doi: 10.1093/jaarel/lfr061.

“The God-in-the-Constitution Controversy: American Secularisms in Historical Perspective,” in Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age, edited by Linell Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, 87-105. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

“‘We Are Guaranteed Freedom’: Pueblo Indians and the Category of Religion in the 1920s.” History of Religions 45:2 (November 2005), 89-113.  Reprinted in Indigenous Religions, 4 volumes, edited by Graham Harvey and Amy Whitehead. Routledge Press, 2017.

Media Coverage

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/12/05/discriminating-in-the-name-of-religion-segregationists-and-slaveholders-did-it-too/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6775349ecaf8https://news.yale.edu/2017/11/06/cultural-history-religious-freedom-a

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